Blood transfusion and more generally the medical use of blood and derivative products thereof pose the problem associated with the state of health of the donor(s), involving risk of contamination that can lead to the transmission of diseases to recipients. Blood and plasma donation collection centers currently have databases of information concerning the health history of the donors, which are stored in stationary computerized systems and which can be accessed from a label comprising a bar code read by a laser reader. These labels are affixed on the donation bags and on the corresponding control test tubes. Any supplemental information requires a new label, also comprising a bar code, to be affixed. Thus, a same bag can comprise a plurality of labels comprising a bar code providing access to one or several centralized databases.
It seems increasingly necessary to keep the possibility of subsequent access to the data of the donors or recipient patients, especially in the case of an accident during the transfusion; but also because of the discovery of new diseases whose incubation period is very long; it is then difficult to identify the origin thereof, unless statistical or correlative studies, involving a large number of patients are carried out over long periods of time; and this can be achieved only by systematically accumulating data that can be subsequently sorted out.
The use of labels comprising a bar code implies reading the label with a laser pen to retrieve the data from the corresponding databases, in order to then group and store them for subsequent use in another database. This operation, which is performed a posteriori, requires going back to the original source of the data each time, which is complicated and involves risks of omission, for it is always possible to overlook a label.